Ten-year man

A ten-year man was a category of mature student at the University of Cambridge.

Under the University's statutes of 1570, a man over twenty-four could proceed to a BD degree ten years after matriculation without first gaining a BA degree or a MA degree. The device was not used much until the nineteenth century. It was abolished in the mid-nineteenth-century university reforms, after criticism that it had become a route to a Cambridge degree which required no formal test of the man's ability.^[1]

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